Google has been dubbed ‘late’ to the AI party but this hasn’t troubled the company as it wants to take a measured approach when it comes to releasing products and services powered by generative AI, company CEO Sundar Pichai has said. He added the company has more capable [language] models and will upgrade Bard but “getting it right is important” for Google.
In a podcast with The New York Times, Pichai said that Google wanted to be careful with Bard. The company wants to use user feedback to improve models, build trust and a safety layer.
“We knew when we were putting Bard out we wanted to be careful. It’s the beginning of a journey for us. There are a few things you have to get right when you put these models out,” Pichai said.
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“Getting that user feedback cycle and being able to improve your models, build a trust and safety layer turns out to be an important thing to do. Since this was the first time we were putting out, we wanted to see what type of queries we would get. We obviously positioned it carefully,” he added.
Google Bard is ‘an experiment’
Bard is an experiment and Google has been pretty vocal about this narrative. Recently, Sissie Hsiao, vice president and lead of Google Assistant’s business unit also told The Wall Street Journal that “Bard is an early experiment”.
Pichai provided more information in this context saying that Google tried to prepare users for Bard by using a lightweight and efficient version of LaMDA.
“It was an experiment. We tried to prime users to its creative collaborative queries, but people do a variety of things. I think it was slightly maybe lost. We did say we are using a lightweight and efficient version of LaMDA. So in some ways, we put out one of our smaller models out there, what’s powering Bard. And we were careful,” he noted.
Pichai drew an analogy and said Bard is “a souped-up Civic” and the company “kind of put it in a race with more powerful cars.” He said he was “surprised” with performance as it did well “on many, many, many classes of queries.”
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‘We have more capable models’
The Alphabet and Google CEO said that the company will be upgrading Bard to some more capable language models.
“We clearly have more capable models. Pretty soon, maybe as this goes live, we will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, so which will bring more capabilities, be it in reasoning, coding. It can answer math questions better. So you will see progress over the course of next week,” the top executive highlighted.
Pichai also noted that it was important to him to not “put a more capable model before we can fully make sure we can handle it well.”
“But I don’t want it to be just who’s there first, but getting it right is very important to us,” he added.
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